by Tony Parsons
‘I know, Jess. I know how you feel. I really do. This child – it’s tragic.’
‘Is she any more tragic than I am? I wonder.’
‘You want to help the starving millions? Make a donation. Write a cheque. I mean it. You know – sponsor her. These are poor people, Jess. They will be grateful for your help. Call Oxfam. Fill out a direct debit. Give a little something every month. It will be a good thing you’re doing. But it’s the most you can do.’
‘You know why they don’t cry, Paulo? Because they’re not loved. There’s no point in crying if you’re not loved. Because nobody comes.’
Paulo watched his wife reach into the cot and pick up Little Wei.
Jessica gently touched the back of the child’s head, clearly hoping that she would rest it against her chest, the way Poppy did when her aunt touched her in the same way. But Little Wei’s head remained stubbornly upright as she considered the two big-nosed pinkies on either side of her.
‘You were the one who talked about adopting,’ Jessica said.
‘And you were the one who said you would rather get a cat,’ Paulo said.
‘Look at her,’ Jessica said. ‘Just look at her, Paulo. This child needs someone to love her. And look at me. Just look at me. I want to be somebody’s mother. It’s as simple as that.’
Paulo shook his head, and stared at the pair of them. This was insane.
But he watched Little Wei as she placed a tiny hand on Jessica’s chest, her fingers like matchsticks, and some chunk of ice buried deep inside him began to thaw.
Maybe she was right after all.
Maybe it was as simple as that.
Part four:
born at the right time
Twenty-three
When the baby was finally sleeping, Megan lay in bed imagining that she could hear the sound of the island’s two oceans.
She knew that was impossible. Their apartment was in Bridgetown, on the west side of the island, where she tended to accident-prone tourists in the grand hotels of St James, next to the gently lapping waters of the Caribbean.
But Megan liked to believe that she could actually hear the other sea on the other side of the island, her favourite part, where there were no luxury hotels and only a few of the most intrepid tourists, and where the Atlantic whipped huge waves against the rocks of Bathsheba and the east coast of Barbados.
An island with two seas. She had never seen anything like it. And she wondered how many of the tourists who flocked to the west coast of Barbados were ever aware of the rough majesty of the east coast. Everything she had heard about Barbados was true – the postcard images of white sands, wild palms and endless sunshine. But there was another side to the place, untamed and unpredictable, and you would never find it in the glossy brochures. You saw it in the pages of The Advocate and The Nation, all the crimes featuring drugs and knives, sometimes guns, and you could hear it in the wind at night. The heart of the island was wild.
It was hard being so far from her sisters, and their absence left terrible gaps in her everyday life. She missed their phone calls, the ritual breakfasts in Smithfield, the knowledge that they were only a few tube stops away. She missed the selfless hours that Jessica devoted to Poppy, she missed the constantly reassuring presence of Cat.
For as long as she could remember, Megan had thought of herself as self-sufficient – the only one to come through her parents’ divorce undamaged, the straight-A student, the med school princess, doctor baby sister, tough and smart. It was only when she moved abroad that she saw her self-image as the clever little sister had always been built on the unconditional support of her family. But Megan had come to this place to start a new family. She would have preferred someone to look after her daughter out of love. But if love was out of the question, then Bajan dollars would have to do. Poppy was already enrolled in the Plantation Club Nursery in Holetown, and Megan was interviewing prospective nannies. For the first time in her working life, she didn’t have to worry about money.
There was work for her here. Lots of it. But it was a different kind of work from anything she had known in the past. Looking back, it felt like her patients in London had been the victims of poverty. In Barbados they were the victims of affluence.
Yesterday she had visited three different hotels in St James. She had tended a child who had been stung by a jellyfish, a woman who had broken her nose when her jet ski took off without her and a fifty-year-old man who had torn a cartilage in his knee while attempting to windsurf for the first time. The man’s young wife – she had to be the second or third – stood by holding their brand-new baby boy while Megan examined him and wrote a prescription for painkillers.
Typical, Megan thought. They sit in front of a computer screen all year and then imagine they are Action Man as soon as they reach the tropics. Oh yes, there would always be plenty of work for her here.
Megan was also called out to see the victims of sunburn, the ramblers who had blisters caused by touching the poisonous manchineel apple trees that grew all along the St James coastline, and of course the great raft of what back in Hackney they had called UBIs – unexplained beer injuries.
The suspected strokes, possible heart attacks and other emergencies were all shipped straight to the excellent Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Bridgetown. Disappointingly, there were no tropical diseases for her to cure – Barbados had wiped them out long ago. So the medicine that Megan practised in her new life felt curiously bland compared to what she had known in the past.
In Hackney she had looked after heroin addicts, stab victims, alcoholics, the chronically obese and all those residents of the Sunny View Estate who were smoking themselves to death. Here she was far more likely to administer to someone who had been brained by a falling coconut.
It was almost as though nobody could ever really get hurt here, and nobody ever had to die, and the holiday would never have to end.
She felt Kirk stir beside her and she lay dead still as he rolled over and moaned in the darkness, pretending to be sleeping, just in case he awoke and reached for her, just in case he might want sex and not give her a chance to prepare her excuse. They had never been able to get back to how it had been that first night.
But he didn’t wake up, and he didn’t reach for her, so Megan lay there in the Bajan night, listening to the winds whip and whistle around Bathsheba, on the other side of paradise.
Cat took the lift to her mother’s flat.
Even a quarter of a century on, there was still a part of her that was for ever that bright, gawky eleven-year-old girl, all legs and arms and eyes, watching her mother apply her make-up, smiling at her in the mirror, her eleven-year-old world about to fall apart.
‘Now you’re my big girl, Cat. Yes, Jessie is big too but she’s timid and Megan’s still a baby. But you’re my big, big girl, and I know you are going to be brave, aren’t you?’
Cat had nodded uncertainly, and then the taxi was there with the man in the back seat, waiting to take her mother away for ever.
In the years to come, when Cat and her sisters suffered the thousand cuts of having an absent parent, she really tried – she tried so hard to be brave. And as the lift opened on her mother’s floor, she was trying still.
But she was afraid that her mother would always have the power to hurt her, and that she would never be quite brave enough.
Cat rang the bell and Olivia’s face appeared before her.
‘Get it, did you?’
Cat nodded. ‘I’ve got it.’
They went into the flat. It seemed far smaller than Cat remembered from that day long ago when she tried to move in with her sisters, but just as immaculate, just as untouched by any dirty childish paws. There were photographs of her mother, young and beautiful, in the smiling company of people more famous than herself. Once these photographs had seemed impossibly glamorous to Cat, and now they seemed rather pathetic, almost touching.
Those end-of-the-pier comedians, corny macho men from the telly – so many of the
m, all those hard-bitten cops, wayward private dicks and sub-James Bond special agents – and fading starlets, most of them long forgotten now. Was that the best her mother could do? Was that why she had given up her children? For some little league hunk in the back of a cab, and a life of small-time glory? Yet even now Cat was stung to see there were no pictures displayed of Olivia’s children. Cat was angry with herself and thought, why should I care?
In the next room there was the sound of some kind of domestic chore being performed. The dark face of a cleaner or housekeeper appeared in a doorway, and then was gone.
‘You’re having a baby,’ her mother said, lighting up a cigarette.
‘That’s right,’ Cat said. ‘But please smoke anyway.’
‘Do I know the father?’
‘The father’s out of the picture.’
‘Oh dear. Chuck you, did he?’
I have been in the room for two minutes, Cat thought, and we are already at each other’s throats. I must rise above this, she thought.
‘I didn’t let him stick around long enough to do that.’ Her mother raised her eyebrows. Did that well-worn gesture actually mean anything? ‘Do you remember what you once told me?’ Cat said. ‘Your parents fuck up the first half of your life, and your children fuck up the second half.’
‘Did I tell you that?’ Olivia chuckled, clearly pleased with herself. ‘It’s true.’
‘Well, what about your partners? It seems to me that they fuck it up more than anyone. But only if you let them. Only if you allow them to.’
Her mother laughed again.
‘You’re not one of those sperm bandits that I keep reading about, are you?’
‘A sperm bandit?’
‘One of those women who just wants a man for as long as it takes to get her up the duff.’
‘Yes, that’s me exactly. A sperm bandit. Here. This is what you need.’
Cat opened her bag, took out a cigarette pack and gave it to her mother. Olivia shut the door where the cleaner’s face had been glimpsed and then she examined the contents of the pack – something wrapped in silver foil.
She glanced at the shut door, and then unwrapped the foil, revealing a sizeable chunk of hashish.
Olivia smiled grimly at Cat.
‘It must have been difficult for you,’ her mother said.
Cat shook her head. ‘I’ve worked around kitchen staff for years. They can be a wild bunch, some of them. It wasn’t so difficult.’
‘I didn’t mean buying me drugs, dear. I meant coming here.’
‘No problem. There’s also a telephone number. If it works. If ever you want some more.’
Cat gave her mother a Mamma-san matchbox with a mobile phone number scribbled on the inside flap.
‘You call this number and ask for Dirty Dave,’ Cat said.
Olivia shook her head.
‘I ask for – Dirty Dave?’
‘That’s right. He’s the one who takes care of my kitchen staff.’
‘By “take care”, you mean he sells them drugs?’
‘No, I mean he comes in once a week and does their ironing.’
‘Do you seriously expect me to call someone known as Dirty Dave and buy drugs from him?’
Cat sighed.
‘I don’t care what you do. This is for your benefit, not mine.’
‘You’re a hard-hearted cow, aren’t you?’ Olivia snarled, suddenly flaring up.
‘Well, I had a good teacher,’ Cat flashed back.
Then she bit her lip. She remembered that for the few years her mother had stuck around, she had never been a smacker, but when that temper boiled over, she was a big thrower of shoes. Cat didn’t want her mother throwing shoes today. She was a sick woman, and Cat wanted to go home and lie down and feel her baby pushing against the limits of its little world.
‘Do you know what to do with this stuff? You heat it up –’
Olivia raised her hand. ‘I’m not your maiden aunt from Brighton, you know. My God. My generation invented your culture.’
‘It’s not my culture.’
Cat turned to go.
‘I really do appreciate it,’ Olivia said, her voice softening, her fingers fiddling nervously with the matchbox. ‘You coming here. Doing this. I know it’s been a long time. I see your sisters. But never you.’
Cat turned to face her.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘I see that as your doing, not mine. And don’t get too sentimental. I’m only doing this because Megan asked me to.’
‘I thought you were beautiful, you know.’
‘What?’
‘The three of you. You and your sisters.’
Cat laughed.
‘Megan’s pretty. Jessie you could call beautiful. But not me.’
‘Don’t put yourself down, dear. You’ve got a great pair of pins. I have a friend – he’s a shrink – and he thinks that was part of the problem. It’s hard for a woman. Your daughters are turning into gorgeous women just as everything is starting to head south. Beautiful children who grew into beautiful women. My three girls.’
‘Your three girls?’
Cat let her mother’s claim hang in the air, and the silence said, You don’t have a right to call us that.
Olivia squinted at Dirty Dave’s phone number, her hands shaking. She’s an old woman now, Cat thought. When did my mother become an old woman?
‘It’s difficult with them both away. Megan in Barbados. Jessica still in bloody China. How long is she going to be gone anyway?’
‘I’m sure they’ll both send you a postcard.’
‘You know why I need this, don’t you? You know why I’m turning into a drug user in my twilight years?’
‘Megan told me.’ A pause. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Really?’
‘Of course I am. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.’
‘Don’t turn your back on me, Cat. This specialist that Megan sent me to – it’s not good. The pain is getting worse. And the tremors. And you know the funny bit? MS doesn’t shorten your lifespan. Your muscles go, and you shake like a leaf, and you go blind as a bat. But it doesn’t kill you. You have to live with it.’
It’s a cruel world, Cat thought. Just ask the three children you walked out on. But it was hard hating her mother today. It was harder than it had ever been.
‘I hope this stuff brings you some relief,’ she said, indicating the cigarette packet. ‘I really do.’
Suddenly Olivia took her by the arm. Cat could feel her mother’s long, bony fingers digging into the flesh just below her elbow. It was the firm grip you would take on a recalcitrant child who was about to do something they would soon regret. The shock of unexpected physical contact with her mother made Cat catch a breath.
‘I’m frightened, frightened about what’s going to happen to me,’ Olivia said, pleading now. ‘I’m scared what I am going to become. The person I’m going to turn into. I need someone to take care of me. I need you, Cat. There’s nobody else.’
Cat stared at her mother. Maybe if she had asked for her help twenty years ago – maybe then they would have had a chance. But you can leave it too late, Cat thought. You can run out of time.
As gently as she could, Cat tried to remove her mother’s hand. But Olivia’s grip tightened and Cat’s heart fluttered with panic. It was like being held by the past, still feeling the sting from all those old wounds, and knowing you can never really be free of all those ruined years.
Their eyes met. Olivia’s voice was soft, but her grip didn’t weaken.
It wasn’t the grasp of someone old, Cat thought. It was full of steely determination and physical strength. The clench of someone who was used to getting their own way, to bending the world to their will. Cat could feel her heart beating, could smell her mother’s perfume, could see the old woman starting to fight for breath. Her mother’s fingernails buried deep into her flesh, five points of pain that blurred into one, and her arm started to throb. Cat thought, she is never going to let me go, is she?
‘Stay with me, Cat,’ Olivia said. ‘Do you want me to beg?’
But, more firmly now, Cat took her mother’s wrist and pushed her hand away. The two women took a step away from each other, as if they had finally completed some ancient dance.
‘That’s not who I am,’ Cat said.
When Paulo saw that the Baresi Brothers showroom was locked up and in darkness, he told the taxi driver to wait.
His head still fogged with jet lag from the flight, he rang the bell and pressed his face up against the plate glass. For a moment China felt like a dream. The stock in the window was exactly the same as when he had last seen it, over a month ago. Five weeks without a single sale? That wasn’t right.
He had been gone too long, he saw that now. But it took a long time to become instant parents, and they were still not quite there.
Paulo went back to the taxi and gave the driver Michael’s address. The cab crawled down the stalled Holloway Road, and Paulo felt a creeping sense of dread.
He had pushed London and work out of his head, and that had been wrong. But it was his only way of coping with the marathon that they had been asked to run before Little Wei could come home.
There had been countless interviews at the adoption agency, the orphanage and the British embassy. Their entire lives were under the microscope – their financial situation, their character references, their experience with children, their suitability for adoption. Everything had to be translated into English and Chinese, every evaluation, assessment and recommendation, and everything took far longer than expected.
The only thing that kept them sane were the moments of magic between all the bureaucracy and waiting, the days when they were allowed to take Little Wei for a walk in her new stroller around the Summer Palace and Beijing Zoo and Tiananmen Square, always back to Tiananmen, so big it felt that you were walking on the surface of the moon, pushing Little Wei until she slept, ignoring the gawping stares and smirks of locals and tourists alike. Spending time with their baby daughter, terrified at how much they loved her, no longer a family of two.